Slashdot Mirror
Your Data Footprint Is Affecting Your Life In Ways You Can't Even Imagine (fastcoexist.com)
An anonymous reader cites the following excerpts from a FastCoExist article: Innocently clicking on a link results in ad targeting that's hard to shake and our purchases quickly reveal more information than we intend, such as the infamous example of Target knowing a woman is pregnant before she's told her family -- and before she's purchased any baby products. [...] Predictions about you are deeply shaping your life in ways of which you are probably blissfully unaware. Predictions about you (and millions of other strangers) are starting to deeply shape your life. Your career, your love life, major decisions about your health and well-being, and even if you end up in jail, are now being governed in no small part by the digital bread crumbs you've left behind -- many of which you don't even know you've dropped in the first place.
Only buy routine items online. For anything that requires a bit of discretion, buy it at a physical store with cash.
I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI and NSA start requiring retailers to log cash purchases on their systems.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's not just ads: financial companies track your transactions, and by default, they share your information with "partners." Scroll through your credit card usage, and you can quickly imagine how your trips to Starbucks can be used to build a valuable profile. To opt out, they make you mail a paper form because they hope you will be too lazy to find a stamp. Of course, Facebook tracks everything.
Or do it the other way around buy lots of bizare and unrelated items, you can always sell them later at eBay. Let Amazon wonder how you can be a pregnant gay man parapalegic who buys a lot of shoes and bike pedals.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
"The lady obviously knows, and it's her secret to tell, so what's the big deal with Target keeping the secret?"
The thing that bothers a lot of people isn't that target figured something out, it is that target demonstrably isn't "keeping" the secret -- they sent her pregnancy-related things that revealed the secret to her parents before she wanted them to (because fairly predictably, her parents were in the same house, and thus saw things that showed up in the mail for her).
I don't mind starbucks knowing how much coffee I consume. I do very much mind when they sell that information to an insurance company that starts calculating my life insurance or health insurance rates. If someone is stalking me, I really don't want them to be able to buy from starbucks the information about which starbucks I use when (from which you can derive roughly where I work and my schedule).
Lots of people browse for porn; it is fine if the provider keeps that info, but when they start selling to the local newspaper a list of people in your town organized by kink, that gets kind of disturbing. Profitable for the porn company perhaps, but most people find that sort of commercialization of data obnoxious.
Advertisers are demonstrably tracking and sharing a lot of information that I didn't give them. When a social network that I don't have an account on starts recommending me as a "person you might know" to coworkers, that says that they've gathered information about me and my job that I never gave them, which they are now sharing with others. I really don't like that.
You are correct that we've always had gossips around that might notice something about me and share it with others; that doesn't mean we liked them, or that we think that their behavior should be institutionalized in every corner of our lives.
They can tell a lot about you by routine purchases, especially if they look for patterns of change. I've read about the Target case; it isn't just obvious things like buying prenatal vitamins and maternity clothes; a sudden switch in preference for unscented products is common with the hormonal changes pregnant women experience.
The prediction doesn't have to be perfect to be uncannily accurate.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.